Marketers won’t be surprised to hear that LinkedIn announced last week that they are launching initial tests of ads on LinkedIn Stories, after rolling out Stories to all users in September. This will enable marketers to utilise the platform’s ad targeting tools to reach a wider audience; including the capability to retarget with additional content those who watched or viewed your Stories Ads.
Stories Ads will have a generic placement, a lot like Instagram, where they will appear in between member posted content and LinkedIn Page Stories at the top of the mobile app.
LinkedIn have played their cards quite close to their chests regarding the success of Stories, only sharing that the response to them has been ‘incredibly positive’ and that they’ve ‘sparked hundreds of thousands of new conversations’.
They’ve not released any analytics, like how many people are using them, engagement rates or how people are responding; stats that marketers want to know before committing ad budget to a campaign.
Does this mean that users aren’t using Stories as much as LinkedIn would have hoped?
The general mood around the Curtis Gabriel office is that it’ll be great to have access to another way of targeting LinkedIn audiences, as the way people are using LinkedIn has changed over the last year to involve more lifestyle content. But we’d still like to see some more insight into member usage, to get a better understanding of the kind of results we could expect for clients.
LinkedIn have said, they are currently testing Stories Ads with a beta group of advertisers, with plans to launch more broadly in 2021.
Hannah Lymn: Social Media Specialist 